Keg of Aged Hunter's Ale Scam

Simple, Don't allow trade with items with spent uses.

Or instead of ANet spending time changing that, people can simply use common sense and read. That's what eyes are for. People who let their friends use their items such as perfect salvage kits shouldn't lose out on that because people are incompetent to read.

reading is overrated and impractical

I know. That's my point.

The OP didn't complete the trade, and apparently didn't say anything to the seller. So was this a mistake? Or intentional? We don't know.
I agree with this as well, but I've already had my fill of the "is this a scam" question in a thread about some Nicholas gifts.

There is concept, "Implied Condition" Selling a car for 4,00 dollars implies the car is in reasonably good shape. Selling a Keg of ale at current "full keg" prices implies it is a full keg. As with selling "Nicholas Gifts" at traverler's gift" prices...etc etc Though the OP did not accept the trade, he still should have told the seller about the only 1 use left. If the seller continued to have tried to sell that 1 use keg for the full keg price then with screenshots he could have been reported. A persons failer to look at an item first does NOT absolve the scamer of any of the responcibility. Any who LOLs at others and accuses others at being at fault for not looking, well.... I question thier honesty and intregrity.
This however is not a clear cut case of scamming. Very possible it was an honest mistake.

I find it curious that someone who was supposedly selling full kegs has 1-use left keg as well.

Well, not curious. More like suspicious.

Lets see: Say he would be drinking for title and selling leftovers. That makes him very, very lucky to get 1 use keg out of it after drinking his last before getting detox.

Or he could be progressing title AND selling his booze at same time. That's kinda wtf, but lets go ahead with that. He would still be quite lucky to end up with 1-shot keg when selling his other kegs. I'd say most of players would just gulp last one to save storage slots instead of letting it rot in inventory.

Or maybe he was reselling someone elses low-charge keg. Why would he waste time and storage on essentially 300g item is beyond me, but okay, lets go ahead. Someone reselling low charge kegs and ends up with 1 charge. How curious.

Or he got it because he is in reselling full kegs business and someone scammed him with 1 charge thing. Believable. But why keep it around?

Or he is simply trying to scam and has fallback plan called "honest mistake" to avoid ban when confronted.

Pretty much all honest mistake possibilities sound way too far fetched compared to simple scam explanation.

----

You know:

Buy Keg
Use 49 charges
Sell as full
Repeat

That sounds like a way to get free drunkard or at least huge discount.

zwei2stein, Those are all very good points and I do agree with them 100%. My personal opinion is the seller was a scammer. But if you were to try to report people for wrong doing and it WAS just a simple mistake....would you not be subject to possible action from A-NET? Any way, the reason for my last sentence was that it would have been hard to prove the sellers intent despite all the reasonable circumstancel evidence you sited. Without screenshots and maybe some follow up observation showing otherwise, the seller is innocent till proven guilty. A concept that is hard to swallow at times, but neccessary.

You said he "tried" to sell it to you. Does that imply it didn't work, or did you buy it?

Lucky? How so?

I finished Party Animal and Sweet Tooth titles on my elementalist, with things left over. Of course no sweets or party items are multi-use, but it's perfectly conceivable to have leftovers. Maybe, like me, the person with the partial keg wanted to stop at exactly 10000 points.

Also, given the number of sweets and party items I was collecting, I frequently had to put things on a mule so my ele could actually pick stuff up (for example, I'd hoard party items to have a large display when there were other people around to enjoy it). Or I'd get sweets/party items on a different character, then forget to transfer to my ele. Not too hard to imagine that inventory got mixed up somewhere. I found a few characters with party/sweet items long after I'd finished the title.

Or maybe the seller was working on drunkard title, then decided that it could wait -- but inventory is limited and kegs don't stack, so decided to sell the full kegs for now, and mixed up the full keg for sale with a partial keg.

Or maybe the seller was working on the title but decided that there was a shiny weapon someone was selling that he really wanted but didn't have quite enough cash for, so meant to sell off a full keg to buy the weapon.

Or maybe the seller was working on the title and his mom decided that a Drunkard was disgraceful, so was forcing him to get rid of the kegs.

Or maybe the seller wanted to participate in his guild's PvP, but didn't have enough money to buy the skills for the character that they wanted him to play.
That's because you only touched on a handful of possible explanations. I do agree that the ones you presented are far fetched, though.

Really, I think it's highly probable that this was intended as a "take advantage of another player" trade. But with the lack of detail given by the OP, I don't think we can make an accurate conclusion about it.